The cream appears to be rising

As the well-drilled Canterbury Bulldogs continued to be the NRL benchmark with their 38-6 demolition of the St George Illawarra Dragons on Sunday (their sixth win on the trot), a couple of big teams continued their move up the table after relatively indifferent starts. On Friday night, the Sydney Roosters won their third game on the run, walloping an under-strength Wests Tigers outfit 30-6 despite completing just 28 of 41 sets (a slackness they are unlikely to get away with next week against the Cowboys in Townsville). Then, on Saturday, the South Sydney Rabbitohs beat the ladder-leading Titans 40-18 with arguably their most complete performance of the season – one in which the Bunnies’ backline reaped the hay sewn by their formidable forwards. That’s four wins in five now (that one loss being a one-pointer to the Dogs) for Souths who currently sit fifth, one spot behind the Roosters on for and against. With Manly still in second, despite their narrow loss to the Storm on Saturday night, and the Storm moving into eighth, the premiership table, for some time looking like it had been mistakenly inverted, is beginning to take a more predictable shape.

At this rate, Marshall won’t make a difference

Anyone who’s been forced to watch the St George Illawarra Dragons play of late (a court-ordered punishment, perhaps) will have noticed how gentlemanly the Dragons are, particularly in the forwards. When the opposition run at them the Dragons defenders don’t rush up to meet them, for fear of being presumptuous, but instead stand and wait. Then, at the point of collision, they either grab hold apologetically and hold on until the opposition player tires of carrying them (which can take a good 20m or so), or instead they allow the opposition player to simply pass through unmolested, giving them, as they blast by, a hearty slap on the back and a kindly call of “Safe travels, ol’ sport!” When the Dragons forwards have the ball, well, they either drop it to prevent the opposition players having to tax themselves, or else they hit the defensive wall with all the menace of a meringue flung by a small child in callipers.

Two days before the Bulldogs flattened them 38-6, the Dragons signed Benji Marshall to a two-and-a-half year contract. Yet even if the one-time Kiwi magician conjures his greatest feat yet (by returning to anything remotely resembling his best form) it’ll make scant difference behind this pack: one that Steve Price seems to have no idea how to fix, and one that no team has reason to fear.

Was the Titans loss an aberration or a portent of doom?

Watching the Rabbitohs take apart Gold Coast on their home patch on Saturday night it crossed the mind that this could be the point the Titans, previously walking the high wire with confidence and purpose, look down and get the death wobbles. Up against a Rabbitohs’ pack bolstered by a buttress of Burgesses – and the flying feet and deceptive power of Dylan Walker– the Titans were trampled underfoot, and but for a brief rally before half-time they did not look like the team that have been there or thereabouts all season. Prior to the game Greg Bird opined that the Titans weren’t getting the media love they deserved for their impressive start to the season. He was right, but now this seven-tries-to-three loss will play into the hands of all those who have the treated the Titans’ gravity-defying start as a prelude to the inevitable fall. A win next week against their rivals, the Broncos, may see their Souths result safely compartmentalised as “just one of those days”, but another loss may sow the seeds of doubt and get them thinking that maybe the sceptics were right.

Ricky’s return has run aground

Until they play them (when, as is customary, they lose) the Dragons will be pleased for the heat-taking poor form of the Canberra Raiders. In the past two games the Raiders have had 108 points scored against them (54 by Manly two weeks ago, another 54 on Saturday by the New Zealand Warriors) which has seen them slip to third last on the table while becoming favourites for the wooden spoon. This means that Ricky Stuart, coach of the loveless Eels last season, is in the frame for back-to-back spoons. It sure is a long time since 2002 when, in his debut year as a coach, Stuart won the premiership with the Roosters. He may well have joked “It’s all downhill from here,” in the aftermath of that win, not realising he was being scarily prophetic. That said, it would be easy to blame Stuart for the Raiders’ recent performances (which have brought to mind a fat wombat failing to negotiate a safe crossing of the Hume Highway at dusk), as much as his underperforming players, but it’s not as if such losses are uncharacteristic of the team over the past few years. Yet Stuart was brought home by the Raiders to change a team culture that seems to accept a good win every three or four weeks is sufficient. Those kinds of changes are never instantaneous, especially without a significant change to the roster, but the signs aren’t good. Stuart has much work to do.

Mitchell Pearce’s timing could have been better

On Saturday the Sydney Roosters were presenting themselves as some kind of benevolent society. An altruistic cloisters, if you will, where young men who’d fallen on hard times – or even rushed headlong into them with abandon – could recuperate and flourish in the bosom of the strong, heavily-tattooed Bondi brotherhood. Never mind that in their kindly application to register deregistered Canberra Raider, Blake Ferguson (found guilty of indecent assault last year, and with numerous priors for alcohol-related shenanigans), they will potentially be ending up with a footballer of considerable ability. That’s by the by. This is all about helping Ferguson get his life back on track.

Well, in a classic case of poor timing, Roosters halfback Mitchell Pearce was arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning for refusing to leave a nightclub, then taken to Kings Cross police station and issued an infringement notice. One wonders about the reception he received when he returned to the Bondi cloisters with its calming swish of cassocks on the worn stone floors. Did he slink back to his room for a cup of tea, a Milk Arrowroot and a chastening chapter of Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy? Or was he hauled over the coals by Roosters prelate, Nick Politis, for giving the NRL more reason to pause when it comes to decide on Ferguson’s immediate future?